On Sunday October 16, 2005 our Foundation held its first annual open house. On a beautiful sunny afternoon 60 members and visitors came to Gramercy Park to celebrate our first birthday. They perused our many press notices, colorful photographs of projects that we have funded, and informational pages from our website. They also inspected the many CHF t-shirts and sweatshirts for sale and did some early holiday shopping.

Then they enjoyed a buffet lunch beautifully prepared by Moon Fong, Yin Simpson and Bob Bergad. There were shrimp cocktail, spinach balls, potato bites, Chinese tsaotze and taro cake. For a chaser there were fresh fruit, ginger cookies and cream puffs.A brief program followed. Founder Ming Tchou was effusive in her delight that the Foundation has begun with such an auspicious start--commissioning music, supporting education and festivals. She was grateful for a dedicated and productive advisory committee (Pearl Bergad, Margaret Wong, Yin Simpson, and Norton Lam), an energetic and inventive webmaster (Norton Lam), and a thoughtful and resourceful advisor (Dan Berg). She earnestly invited everyone to join in making CHF a force in our community.

Dan Berg, Senior Asset Development Officer from The Minneapolis Foundation, spoke next. He described the many options in giving that were available and offered to meet with interested donors. Emcee, Margaret Wong, followed by describing the awards we had given in the last year and invited Dr. Karle Erickson from the World Voices of Minnesota to speak. Karle spoke eloquently of the wonderful choral work, Four Seasons, that CHF had commissioned internationally acclaimed Chinese composer Zhou Long to write for his chorus and the enthusiastic reception the work received at its world premiere. Karle was passionate in pursuing his Chorus's goal to tear down barriers among different countries around the world, and to encourage everyone to think outside the box and with a global perspective. He mentioned that his Chorus has already recorded Four Seasons and will be sending the recording to high schools around the state and encouraging them to add it to their repertoire.

Mark Tang from the Dragon Festival also spoke. He talked about the wonderful success of this year's festival, the increase in the number of boats in the dragon boat race to 21, and the number of people who attended went up to 7,000. The Festival has been a great collaboration among all Asian arts organizations. For more information on our grant awards, please visit the Current and Past Awards page. The atmosphere at our open house was festive and celebratory. Everyone was pleased to be there and we look forward to a bigger membership and attendance and more activities at our open house next year. Stay tuned!